Welcome to Our House
So what's the title all about? The short answer: a song, a book, a physical building, and a family. If you're interested, here's the long answer...
How I got here: I've been thinking about starting a blog for awhile. A friend has been encouraging me to do it for over a year, now. She swears by its motivating power for those of us busy moms who want to write but can't seem to rationalize its place on the top of our priority lists. Anyway, I haven't felt much urgency to begin one, until recently. Recent changes, including setting aside my part-time gig teaching writing to become a full-time SAHM of three has prompted me to create a new outlet for my writing interest. So, I decided that it might be nice to keep far-away friends and family in the know with a blog. I get to write, you get periodic updates and pictures. Everybody's happy.
Our House: Every story needs an angle, right? I tell my students that all the time. You can't write a good essay without an angle. Well, it turns out every blog needs one, too. While thinking about my goals for this project, the lyrics to a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young) kept popping in my head (thanks, Mom!). It's called, are you ready?...."Our House."
I'll light the fireYou put the flowers in the vase
That you bought today
Staring at the fire
For hours and hours
While I listen to you
Play your love songs
All night long for me
Only for me
Come to me now
And rest your head for just five minutes
Everything is good
Such a cozy room
The windows are illuminated
By the sunshine through them
Fiery gems for you
Only for you
Our house is a very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
'Cause of you
And our la,la,la, la,la, la, la, la, la, la, la.....
I have such great memories of riding in the car with my mom, listening to her sing these lyrics and learning them myself. Something about this song reminds me of being a kid and feeling safe. As an adult and mom, I love the idea of home being a world within the world--a shelter, a place of returning, a place where simple acts like putting flowers in a vase and lighting a fire hold a sacred weight of their own.
And while I was thinking about the song, I also started thinking about my favorite book by Frederick Buechner. In Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Buechner writes about the way fairy tales, the stories that ordinary people tell and pass down and learn by heart, the stories of fantastical worlds and extraordinary feats of bravery, and clashes of good evil, and, ultimately, happy endings, tell us something about the kinds of things we (the human race) long for and dream of.
Buechner points out that the fantastical world of the fairy tale is not so very far from everyday life as we might imagine. The heroes and heroines enter that world usually unexpectedly; in the blink of an eye they move from a perfectly ordinary day into, say, Wonderland. Alice through the looking glass, Lucy through the wardrobe, Dorothy by way of Kansas. "You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary," writes Buechner.
The world of fairy tales is a lot like our own world where good and evil dwell together, where sorrow sometimes seems to gain the upper hand, but where, in the end, "joy comes in the morning" (Psalm). And not just modest joy, but the kind of consuming joy that only heaven promises. I like the idea of that world of magic and wonder being ever at our doorstep, of living with us under our roofs, of our ordinary lives being fraught with the possibility of happily ever after.
Buechner writes, "If you still have something more than just eyes to see with, the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker." The extraordinary living in the ordinary. The light in all things. The light that not even darkness can overcome. And we, the so very ordinary inhabitants of this world, we are the receivers of that great gift.
So, our house...a place where glimpses of God's great love live in the mundane circumstances of our lives, if only we have eyes to see and hearts to listen. Ordinary miracles.
The last source for the title: the Book itself. God is given so many attributes in the Bible, but one of my favorite images or metaphors is God as our shelter. Sometimes he is a great bird sheltering us under his wings, other times our dwelling place--the place we take our heavy hearts, the place where we find rest. Home. God is home.
Our house is so much more than a physical building where we store our stuff. It's more than a roof overhead. Our little cookie cutter house in New England with its leaky basement on a postage stamp lot that gets its green in spring from wild moss and crabgrass has infinite value because of the people and love and faith that dwell there. It's where ordinary miracles happen every day.
And I'm guessing your houses hold miracles, too.
